Month: August 2008

JoVE and (self-)archiving?

In my previous post, I was glad to see that the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) was now indexed by PubMed. I then spent some time watching some very interesting videos. And I realized that something is missing …

In my mind, I thought that third-party archiving (like arXiv or self-archiving) was one of the mandatory requirements for Open Access journals … and I was wrong. It seems JoVE is not giving the (technical) possibility to download the publication from their website (all what you can download is the abstract in text version). Now that this publication is a video and not a text/PDF version, it’s a problem for me (who cares?) and the Open Access movement (imho).

“Classical” Open Access journals are “just” an evolution of traditional, Closed Access journals (or rather a return to the original transmission form of scientific papers): usually, you can read the paper on the journal website but you can also download it and print it if you want (for offline reading or if you still prefer articles on paper). The problem with videos is that you can’t print them. Is it a sufficient reason to forbid the download of these videos?

Fortunately, there is a technical trick to allow you to download the video (it will still be in Flash 9 format but this problem is currently out of our scope). Once you are on the page of the interesting video (example), view its source code (Ctrl+U in Firefox) and look for the string “xml_file_name”. You can now copy the value of this variable and you can stop before the first “%26” you encounter ; for our example, we’ll copy this: “http://www.jove.com/projects/VideoChapterXML/default.aspx?VideoID=211”. Enter this in your address bar and you’ll get another (XML) file (hence the name). Now on the first line, you’ll get the URL of your video in Flash format (flv); in our example: “http://source.jove.com/164.flv”.

In the future I wonder if JoVE will include a link to download its videos or it will obfuscate its source code in order to forbid further download.

JoVE on PubMed

JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. Think of a YouTube-like service for the life-science community, add a quality control before publication and you’ll get the picture. As many other Open Access scientific journal, JoVE is now indexed in PubMed, the life-science publications directory. It’s nice to see interesting, open and innovative initiatives getting a “recognition” like this.

Thanks to Biosingularity for the info.

E-conferences

Following my previous post about an e-conference, Daneel Ariantho provided me with interesting informations …

The conference about scientific patents was part of Second Nature, (scientific journal) Nature’s home in the virtual world of Second Life. Following their description, Second Nature is home to scientific exhibitions, ongoing projects and regular events. The conference in itself was given in November 2007 but, unfortunately, nor slides nor podcast are available. In real life, if you miss a conference, you still have a copy of the slides or, at least, the abstract 😉 .

In the second part of my post, I was wondering if contacts were better in virtual worlds and if the quality standard of most “real world” scientific events was still there. But since this particular event was organized by a Closed Access journal on a semi-closed virtual world, I will wait for more events of this kind before forming an opinion on these events (current educational events in Second Life doesn’t seem to be too serious …).

E-conference about scientific patents

While looking for pictures related to patents, I found these interesting ones taken by Daneel Ariantho on Flickr. They depict a virtual conference about scientific patents. It could be interesting to get more information about 1) the content of this conference and 2) the kind of conferences organized in these virtual worlds. It could also be interesting to see the social aspects of these conferences (are your contact better/different in a virtual conference?) and the “quality control” (of speakers, of posters, of advertizers, …).